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Protester Killings and Impunity Security Forces Used Excessive Force to Disperse Protests Early in the Year

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Protester Killings and Impunity Security Forces Used Excessive Force to Disperse Protests Early in the Year JANUARY 2015 COUNTRY SUMMARY Egypt Egypt’s human rights crisis, the most serious in the country’s modern history, continued unabated throughout 2014. The government consolidated control through constriction of basic freedoms and a stifling campaign of arrests targeting political opponents. Former Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who took office in June, has overseen a reversal of the human rights gains that followed the 2011 uprising. Security forces and an increasingly politicized judiciary—apparently unnerved by rising armed group attacks—invoked national security to muzzle nearly all dissent. Judges routinely ordered detainees held for months based on little, if any, evidence. Thousands arrested after mass protests in 2013 remained in pretrial detention. Pervasive impunity characterized the government’s response to security force abuses. Only four officers have faced charges for human rights violations since July 3, 2013, when the military overthrew President Mohamed Morsy. All the charges stemmed from one incident in August 2013 in which police tear gassed a packed prison van, killing 37 detainees. There has been no accountability for the deaths of more than 1,000 protesters in a series of mostly peaceful demonstrations in July and August 2013. Protester Killings and Impunity Security forces used excessive force to disperse protests early in the year. Nearly 20 people, most of them Morsy supporters, died in clashes with police in the first three days of January. On January 25, the third anniversary of the 2011 uprising, at least 64 demonstrators died in clashes with police in protests throughout the country. Outgoing interim president, Adly Mansour, who handed over power to al-Sisi on June 8, established a presidential fact-finding committee in December 2013 “to gather information and evidence for the violent events” that accompanied the June 30 mass protests and July 3 coup that brought down Morsy, Egypt’s first freely elected president. An executive summary of the commission’s report, released on November 26, did not recommend that 1 charges be brought against any member of the security forces or government for the mass killing. Its mandate did not authorize it to subpoena witnesses or documents, establish individual criminal liability, or make its findings public. In March, Mansour asked the Justice Ministry to open a judicial investigation into the August 14, 2013, dispersals of pro-Morsy sit-ins at Rab’a and Nahda squares in Cairo in which more than 800 protesters died. The ministry announced it would not assign a judge to investigate these events because this was the prerogative of the prosecutor general, whose office claimed it was already investigating. A March 18 court ruling sentenced a police captain to 10 years in prison and three lower- ranking officers to one-year suspended sentences for their role in the tear gas suffocation of 37 protesters in a police van outside Abu Zaabel Prison on August 18, 2013. An appeals court overturned the convictions on June 7 and referred the case to the prosecutor general for further investigation. A retrial is scheduled to begin on January 22, 2015. Mass Arrests An Interior Ministry official acknowledged in July 2014 that since Morsy’s ouster a year earlier authorities had arrested 22,000 people, most if not all suspected supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. According to the Egyptian Center for Economic and Social Rights, more than 41,000 people were arrested or faced criminal charges between July 2013 and May 2014. Judges routinely renewed detention orders of many of those arrested for months without charge or trial and convicted many others in mass trials without establishing individual guilt for criminal offenses. As of July 2014, according to Interior Ministry data provided to the presidential fact-finding committee, more than 7,000 people arrested in the fallout from Morsy’s removal remained in pretrial detention. Those detained include around 29,000 Brotherhood members, including its high and mid- level leadership, according to the Brotherhood. The arrest campaign expanded in 2014 to include secular and leftist activists on charges that include protesting without authorization, incitement, “thuggery,” vandalism, blocking roads, and belonging to banned or “terrorist” groups. 2 Due Process Violations and Mass Death Sentences Egypt’s judiciary exhibited serious procedural deficiencies that deprived detainees of basic due process rights. Though authorities in November 2013 lifted the state of emergency imposed at the time of Morsy’s removal, judges often renewed pretrial detention orders despite a lack of evidence that would warrant prosecution. Many trials violated Egyptian law as well as international standards. In March and April, a criminal court judge in the governorate of Minya handed down the death penalty to more than 1,200 people allegedly involved in two attacks on police that resulted in the death of one officer. The judge did not allow the defendants the right to mount a meaningful defense or ensure that all had access to counsel. The first trial, which resulted in 529 death sentences, lasted less than an hour, and only 74 defendants were present. The court also barred some defense lawyers from attending. In the second trial, which yielded 683 death sentences, none of the defendants attended. Following legally mandated advice from the grand mufti, Egypt’s top religious authority, the judge confirmed 220 of the death sentences, which the prosecutor general automatically appealed as required by law. In December, a separate judge in the governorate of Giza issued preliminary death sentences to 188 people accused of attacking a police station in August 2013 and killing 14 policemen. According to the Brotherhood, 259 of its members, including Supreme Guide Mohamed Badie, have been sentenced to death since Morsy’s ouster. Egypt’s 2014 constitution permits military trials for civilians, and on October 27, 2014, al- Sisi issued a decree expanding military court jurisdiction to cover crimes that occur on any public, state-owned, or “vital” property. Since the decree, prosecutors have referred at least 455 people—the vast majority of them Brotherhood members—to military court. In April, a military court sentenced a social media manager for the online news website Rassd to one year in prison for helping to leak a tape of remarks by al-Sisi during his time as defense minister. The court acquitted one Rassd employee and handed down three-year sentences to an army conscript and two other men who remain at large. In May and September, military courts handed down one-year sentences to 10 people—most of them 3 Brotherhood members or allied politicians—for attempting to cross into Sudan illegally. In November, a military court in Suez sentenced 17 people to between 5 and 10 years in prison for throwing rocks and incendiary devices at soldiers during the violence following Morsy’s removal. Torture and Ill-Treatment At least 90 people died in local police stations and security directorates in the governorates of Cairo and Giza alone in 2014, according to an investigation by the Egyptian newspaper Al Watan, which cited statistics from the Justice Ministry’s Forensic Medical Authority. That number represented a 38 percent increase from the year before. A spokesman for the authority told the newspaper that prison overcrowding had forced authorities to hold detainees in police stations and other places of temporary detention which were not well ventilated or otherwise properly equipped. Witnesses told Human Rights Watch that police and prison authorities often failed to provide proper medical care to prisoners, leading to death. In some cases of deaths in detention, lawyers and relatives alleged that authorities had tortured the victim. Detainees also described severe beatings during arrest, arrival at police stations, and transfer between prisons. Scores detained in January protests complained of torture, including electric shocks, to coerce confessions. The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights documented the enforced disappearance and torture of dozens of civilians in military detention. Attacks by Armed Groups The security situation deteriorated, particularly in the Sinai, as armed groups targeted security forces, buildings, checkpoints, and vehicles. An Egyptian insurgent group, Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, announced that it has joined the extremist group Islamic State (also known as ISIS). Some attacks targeted tourists or indiscriminately harmed ordinary citizens. At least 892 people—including militants, civilians and security forces—died in the governorate of North Sinai in 2014, according to press reports. 4 Freedom of Association, Expression, and Assembly Egypt’s new constitution contains language that appears to protect free expression, peaceful assembly, and association, but authorities detained thousands solely for their peaceful exercise of these rights. Free Expression Authorities detained dozens of people for such offences as possessing flyers with anti- military slogans, rapping in public against the police, or displaying signs commemorating victims of the Rab’a dispersal. Journalists, academics, former lawmakers and human rights defenders were among those charged with crimes or banned from travel outside Egypt. Police arrested three Al Jazeera English journalists, Mohamed Fahmy, Peter Greste, and Baher Mohamed, in late December 2013, and a court handed down multi-year prison sentences in June 2014 after a trial in which prosecutors failed to present any credible
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